Was it his turn to speak?
‘Cousin…’ said Ardashir, arranging his face, ‘you must understand… I cannot make it my business to buy houses for all my employees, cousin or not cousin… I pay a wage, cousin… That is business in this country.’
Ardashir shrugged as he spoke as if to suggest he deeply disapproved of ‘Business in this country’, but there it was. He was forced, his look said, forced by the English to make an awful lot of money.
‘You misunderstand me, Ardashir. I have the deposit for the house, it is our house now, we have moved in-’
How on earth has he afforded it, he must work his wife like a bloody slave, thought Ardashir, pulling out another paperclip from the bottom drawer.
‘I need only a small wage increase to help me finance the move. To make things a little easier as we settle in. And Alsana, well, she is pregnant.’
Pregnant. Difficult. The case called for extreme diplomacy.
‘Don’t mistake me, Samad, we are both intelligent, frank men and I think I can speak frankly… I know you’re not a fucking waiter’ – he whispered the expletive and smiled indulgently after it, as if it were a naughty, private thing that brought them closer together – ‘I see your position… of course I do… but you must understand mine… If I made allowances for every relative I employ I’d be walking around like bloody Mr Gandhi. Without a pot to piss in. Spinning my thread by the light of the moon. An example: at this very moment that wastrel Fat Elvis brother-in-law of mine, Hussein-Ishmael-’
‘The butcher?’
‘The butcher, demands that I should raise the price I pay for his stinking meat! “But Ardashir, we are brothers-in-law!” he is saying to me. And I am saying to him, but Mohammed, this is retail…’
It was Samad’s turn to glaze over. He thought of his wife, Alsana, who was not as meek as he had assumed when they married, to whom he must deliver the bad news; Alsana, who was prone to moments, even fits – yes, fits was not too strong a word – of rage. Cousins, aunts, brothers, thought it a bad sign, they worried if there wasn’t some ‘funny mental history’ in Alsana’s family, they sympathized with him the way you sympathize with a man who has bought a stolen car with more mileage on it than first thought. In his naivety Samad had simply assumed a woman so young would be… easy. But Alsana was not… no, she was not easy. It was, he supposed, the way with these young women these days. Archie’s bride… last Tuesday he had seen something in her eyes that wasn’t easy either. It was the new way with these women.
Ardashir came to the end of what he felt was his perfectly worded speech, sat back satisfied, and laid the M for Mukhul he had moulded next to the A for Ardashir that sat on his lap.
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Samad. ‘Thank you so very much.’
That evening there was an awful row. Alsana slung the sewing machine, with the black studded hotpants she was working on, to the floor.
‘Useless! Tell me, Samad Miah, what is the point of moving here – nice house, yes, very nice, very nice – but where is the food?’
‘It is a nice area, we have friends here.’
‘Who are they?’ She slammed her little fist on to the kitchen table, sending the salt and pepper flying, to collide spectacularly with each other in the air. ‘I don’t know them! You fight in an old, forgotten war with some Englishman… married to a black! Whose friends are they? These are the people my child will grow up around? Their children – half blacky-white? But tell me,’ she shouted, returning to her favoured topic, ‘where is our food?’ Theatrically, she threw open every cupboard in the kitchen. ‘Where is it? Can we eat china?’ Two plates smashed to the floor. She patted her stomach to indicate her unborn child and pointed to the pieces. ‘Hungry?’
Samad, who had an equally melodramatic nature when prompted, yanked upon the freezer and pulled out a mountain of meat which he piled in the middle of the room. His mother worked through the night preparing meat for her family, he said. His mother did not, he said, spend the household money, as Alsana did, on prepared meals, yoghurts and tinned spaghetti.
Alsana punched him full square in the stomach.
‘Samad Iqbal the traditionalist! Why don’t I just squat in the street over a bucket and wash clothes? Eh? In fact, what about my clothes? Edible?’
As Samad clutched his winded belly, there in the kitchen she ripped to shreds every stitch she had on and added them to the pile of frozen lamb, spare cuts from the restaurant. She stood naked before him for a moment, the yet small mound of her pregnancy in full view, then put on a long, brown coat and left the house.
But all the same, she reflected, slamming the door behind her, it was true: it was a nice area; she couldn’t deny it as she stormed towards the high road, avoiding trees where previously, in Whitechapel, she avoided flung-out mattresses and the homeless. It would be good for the child, she couldn’t deny it. Alsana had a deep-seated belief that living near green spaces was morally beneficial to the young, and there to her right was Gladstone Park, a sweeping horizon of green named after the Liberal Prime Minister (Alsana was from a respected old Bengal family and had read her English History; but look at her now; if they could see what depths…!), and in the Liberal tradition it was a park without fences, unlike the more affluent Queens Park (Victoria’s), with its pointed metal railings. Willesden was not as pretty as Queens Park, but it was a nice area. No denying it. Not like Whitechapel, where that madman E-knock someoneoranother gave a speech that forced them into the basement while kids broke the windows with their steel-capped boots. Rivers of blood silly-billy nonsense. Now she was pregnant she needed a little bit of peace and quiet. Though it was the same here in a way: they all looked at her strangely, this tiny Indian woman stalking the high road in a mackintosh, her plentiful hair flying every which way. Mali’s Kebabs, Mr Cheungs, Raj’s, Malkovich Bakeries – she read the new, unfamiliar signs as she passed. She was shrewd. She saw what this was. ‘Liberal? Hosh-kosh nonsense!’ No one was more liberal than anyone else anywhere anyway. It was only that here, in Willesden, there was just not enough of any one thing to gang up against any other thing and send it running to the cellars while windows were smashed.
‘Survival is what it is about!’ she concluded out loud (she spoke to her baby; she liked to give it one sensible thought a day), making the bell above Crazy Shoes tinkle as she opened the door. Her niece Neena worked there. It was an old-fashioned cobblers. Neena fixed heels back on to stilettos.
‘Alsana, you look like dog shit,’ Neena called over in Bengali. ‘What is that horrible coat?’
‘It’s none of your business, is what it is,’ replied Alsana in English. ‘I came to collect my husband’s shoes, not to chit-chat with Niece-of-Shame.’
Neena was used to this, and now that Alsana had moved to Willesden there would only be more of it. It used to come in longer sentences, i.e., You have brought nothing but shame… or My niece, the shameful… but now because Alsana no longer had the time or energy to summon up the necessary shock each time, it had become abridged to Niece-of-Shame, an all-purpose tag that summed up the general feeling.